


An Educational Night

by Colubrina



Series: Rare Pair Harry Potter One Shots [10]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Don’t copy to another site, F/M, SpookyScaryDulceWeen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-21
Updated: 2019-10-21
Packaged: 2020-12-27 22:57:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21126644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Colubrina/pseuds/Colubrina
Summary: Tom Riddle does a spell on Halloween to summon a demon.  He wants to learn things he knows not of, but his spell doesn't bring what he expects.





	An Educational Night

It was a dark and stormy night, which irritated Tom Riddle to no end because the forecast had very distinctly called for clear weather. It was not clear. It was not only not clear, but it was also so unclear you couldn’t see through the driving rain even with a very excellent and bright lantern which he had, along with thirteen black candles, all carefully procured for his demon summoning Halloween ritual and now all going to go to waste.  
  
Unless…  
  
Tom closed the door to Hogwarts with a loud thump and hefted the bag with all his demon ritual supplies higher on his shoulder. He had no interest in his pathetic fellow students and their childish urges to stuff their faces with as much sugar as possible. He had magic to explore. If he couldn’t do it outside under the moon, perhaps an abandoned classroom with a locked door would serve just as well.   
  
He passed several giggling girls on their way to the Hogwarts Halloween Feast and held back a sniff. Sure, they were leggy creatures wearing skirts that, to his eye, were at least two inches shorter than the clearly spelled out dress code required, but they had no interest in the Dark Arts and, therefore, no appeal. A quick turn up a staircase that grumbled but slid its way to the fourth floor, and he had privacy in a classroom with a stone floor, a dusty blue velvet chaise lounge that someone had probably liberated from the Ravenclaw Tower years ago and long forgotten about, and a cracked blackboard.  
  
He also had what really mattered: his candles, his wand, and the spellbook that was as forbidden to students as those skirt lengths had been but far, far more interesting. He followed the instructions of that book to draw out the intricate series of sigils on the floor, place the candles, and then lit them with a quick incendio. The chanting required was, like most British spells, bad Latin. Some day he meant to research other languages and other ways to cast, but for now, he’d just summon this demon in Hogwartsian Latin and demand the foul creature share his knowledge.  
  
Its knowledge?  
  
Tom admitted to himself he was a little fuzzy on the gendering of demons, but he didn’t plan to look too closely, so he supposed it didn’t matter.  
  
He did look closely at the way the air shimmered inside the complicated ward. It began to distort what was past it, then became grey and dense as fog, then it glowed, and then, at last, it cleared to reveal…  
  
A girl.  
  
Tom blinked a few times.  
  
He’d expected a hideous, foul creature of the deep. He’d expected something that might look like the drawings he’d studied with some depth in the privacy of his room with the curtains drawn round his bed. A demon might be a bird that breathed both fire and water and spoke to you about natural philosophy, or it might be a man with the head of a boar, the hooves of goats, and a penchant for geometry and damnation. Demons could be any number of things. None of his reading or research had prepared him to summon a rather ordinary-looking girl.  
  
Well, perhaps a bit prettier than ordinary.  
  
But she didn’t have horns or hooves or wings. She didn’t seem to breathe fire or bellow like a bull. She just sat, cross-legged, in the center of his summoning with hair far too long and thick to be real, skin too clear, eyes that sparkled too alluringly even in this dim, candle-lit room.  
  
“You called me from the vasty deep?” she asked. Her voice had a lilt far more pleasing to the ear than the breathy giggles of the girls he went to class with. He couldn’t imagine this girl giggling over the ‘how to snag a rich husband’ column that ran every week in Witch Weekly. Nevertheless, he hadn’t wanted to summon a girl, not even an attractive one. He’d wanted a demon. Tom let out a near growl of exasperation.   
  
“Not you,” he said. “No one wants you.”  
  
“Oh?” she asked. She leaned backward to rest her weight on her hands, and he had to pull his eyes away from her chest. That posture pushed her breasts out in ways Katherine Selwyn, notorious flirt of Ravenclaw, would have emulated. “What were you trying to get?”  
  
“A demon,” he said. “Knowledge of things I know not.”  
  
For some reason, that made her laugh. She trilled out a delighted, joyous peal that invited everyone to join in. It was hard to please women that way. Tom, who generally didn’t care what girls thought of him, shoved away the satisfaction he felt that he’d managed to make this one – this one who was clearly so superior to the rest of her kind – laugh.   
  
“You have books,” she said. She still had that cadence, that flirting, amused, charming cadence to her voice. He’d never heard anyone make books sound both alluring and dismissible at once.  
  
“Not everything is in books,” Tom said.  
  
“True.” Her teeth looked too sharp in the light for a moment, and she licked her lips, and he felt hungry in a way he couldn’t explain. Then she smiled again, and she was nothing but a rather pretty girl, some trivial spirit he’d summoned instead of the power he’d hoped for. This was a night everything had gone wrong. First, it had rained. Now, he’d done the spell not right enough, and he wouldn’t be able to try again until next Halloween. And, because bad things always came in threes, one of the black candles began to sputter and smoke. Some idiot had messed up production, and whatever impurity lay under that wax sent ever-larger plumes of smoke guttering up into the air.  
  
Then it started to rain in the classroom.  
  
Even as the water came down, he realized it had to be a clever spell set to stop fires. Wizarding fire prevention. He’d seen enough buildings destroyed by bombs during the war to appreciate the wonder of a watering system set to go off when it sensed smoke. It probably kept any number of magical accidents in check.  
  
Unfortunately, it also extinguished all his candles and the lantern.  
  
It took him one second too long to realize that without the candles going, the warding keeping the girl away from him was compromised. She had her hand on his chin before he could move, and her voice had gotten husky, and she had a smell he hadn’t noticed until now. It was some kind of sweet, heady perfume that skipped right over the rational parts of his brain and triggered primal instincts, and all he could do was inhale.  
  
“You seem so disappointed,” she said. “I’ve never had a conjurer so displeased to see me before. Usually, it’s all erections and posturing.”  
  
“Erections?” His voice came out in a squeak.  
  
“Happens around succubae,” she said. “The girls melt into a pile of goo, and the boys spring to attention.”  
  
She clicked her tongue, and Tom knew that human beings couldn’t make that sound. It had been described in several of the demon summoning manuals and writers couldn’t settle on whether it was snake-like, or the sound of a door opening into a fire pit, or a key in a lock. It was all of them. It was none of them. It was inhuman and terrifying and alluring and it lit the room with the glow of candles that weren’t there, stopped the water pouring from the ceiling, and dried his clothes. It left him warm. It left him wanting.  
  
“Succubae?” he said. It was another squeak, and he wanted to die. Then he realized that was more probable than not since he was talking to an unrestrained demon and he very much didn’t want to die.   
  
“Mmm,” she said. “Here we are, on Halloween, just you and me, and I do think you said you were interested in learning things? Things you know not?”  
  
“Learning things?” Yet another squeak, and he took a few steps backwards. The blue chaise stopped him, and he fell onto it, sending up clouds of dust. When he stopped coughing – did no one at Hogwarts ever throw anything out? Why was this couch even here? What purpose could it serve? – the succubus had struck a pose that seemed innocent enough but sent blood rushing and made his heart pound and his palms sweat. He hadn’t realized how convenient short skirts could be until now.   
  
It would be rude to suggest they… rude and inappropriate and altogether not what he had planned on doing on this Halloween. “Not everything is in books,” she said, taking a step toward him. “I’ve been told I’m an excellent teacher.”  
  
He couldn’t argue with that. It would be rude. And, it was true that not everything was in books. Books and cleverness only got you so far. And he had intended to spend the evening learning from a demon. It was, perhaps, foolish not to take advantage of this opportunity.   
  
“So, are we agreed?” she asked, taking another step. “A night of… education?”  
  
He agreed.  
  
Oh, how he agreed.  
  
  



End file.
